Language Log

I've simply had it with all the people who keep telling me that they revere The Elements of Style because it's such a nice little book and helped them so much with their writing when they were in college that they carry it everywhere they go and give it to all their students or hand a copy to each new employee that they hire for their company yadda yadda yadda… I have decided that my campaign against Strunk and White's toxic little compendium of unfollowable dumb advice, bungled grammar claims, and outright mendacity must be taken directly to America's colleges, starting with the great universities of the East Coast. For the opening event I have chosen Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I will speak on the Brown campus at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday night next week, April 13, in the Metcalf Chemistry Building Auditorium at 190-194 Thayer Street. Admission is free, and Language Log readers get a 30% discount off that. Be there.

Jonathan Weinberg wrote to suggest that perhaps "explanatory neurophilia" (the fact that people tend to be impressed and persuaded by neuroscientific details even if they provide no explanatory value) is part of a larger phenomenon that also includes "physics envy" (the desire to achieve in other sciences the success of mathematical reasoning from first principles that Newton brought to physics).

A web search for the phrase "Men don't listen" turns up lots of pop-psychology books and articles. There's Allan and Barbara Pease's relationship self-help book Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps;  an online chapter from the book Be Your Own Therapist with the title "Men Don't Listen; Men Don't Communicate"; another self-help book, by Wayne Misner, that's called just plain Men Don't Listen; an MSNBC Today article "Honey, did you hear me? Why men don't listen"; a BBC News Health article from 2000, "Why men don't listen?". And that's just on the first page.

Most of these books and articles propose a biological basis for the phenomenon.

The winners in the Fourth Annual North American Computational Linguistics Competition have been announced. The top eight scorers were:

1st- Ben Sklaroff, Palo Alto, CA, Palo Alto High School
2nd- Brian Kong, Milton, MA, Milton Academy
3rd- Allen Yuan, Farmington Hills, MI, Detroit Country Day School
4th- Daniel Li, Fairfax, VA, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
5th- Alan Chang, San Jose, CA
6th- Alexander Iriza, Astoria, NY, The Dalton School
7th- In-Sung Na, Old Tappan, NJ, Northern Valley Regional HIgh School at Old Tappan
8th- Tian-Yi Damien Jiang, Raleigh, NC, North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics (Durham)

1,118 students participated in the first round of the competition, held on February 4, and the top 100 scorers took part in a second round on March 10.  Squads formed from the best-scoring participants will be eligible to go on to the Eighth International Linguistics Olympiad, to be held in Sweden in July.  NACLO winners have done very well in previous Olympiads.

This is from an actual job listing on BusinessWorkforce.com, advertising a position at the "marketing innovations agency" Ignited:

Integrated Copywriter/Etymologist
Sure, the Eskimos have 40 words for “snow,” but Ignited has 40 words for “next.” That’s because we’re kind of obsessed with what’s next, whether that be in technology or media or Eskimo etymology. If you’ve got that same kind of curiosity and you fit the bill of skills below, you may be the next person we think of when we hear the words “Integrated Copywriter.”

Actual etymologists need not apply.

(See links here and here for more on the much-abused "Eskimo words for snow" trope. Hat tip, Nancy Friedman.)

In the course of an enjoyable conversation over lunch yesterday, Michael Chorost asked whether disfluency is contagious, in the sense (for example) that talking with someone who uses "uh" a lot would tend to lead you to behave similarly.  This seems plausible, since such effects can be found in most other variable aspects of speech and language use, so I promised to check — with a warning that causation is especially difficult to infer from correlation in such cases.

L. Ron Creepweans, "Doctorow and Stross to Write Authorized Sequel to Atlas Shrugged", Locus 4/1/2010.

According to Jennifer Viegas, "New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered", Discovery News, 3/31/2010:

Once thought to be rock art, carved depictions of soldiers, horses and other figures are in fact part of a written language dating back to the Iron Age.

The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.

The "new research" is described in Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan, and Pauline Ziman, "Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy", Proceedings of the Royal Society A, in press.

Lk hr .  Dn't knw f th st wll lst bynd td, thgh.

Intrstng tht sm wrds lk "vwl" r trnsprnt wtht thr vwls, whrs thrs lk "tg"* r mpssbl — _ gss mdl vwls r sr t fll n thn ntl r fnl.

*splld wth vwls ftr th ct.

Dateline April 1, 2010, a bulletin from the Association for Psychological Science to its members:

Google translate for animals:

The England and Wales Court of Appeals delivered its judgment this morning in Simon Singh's appeal of last year's libel verdict against him.  This all began on April 19, 2008, when Singh wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian containing these sentences:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

The BCA sued for libel, and won an initial victory in May of 2009, when Sir David Eady, the presiding judge in the English High Court, decided that Singh's piece involved assertions of fact rather than opinion, and that the word bogus in effect meant "fraudulent" and not just "ineffective". This decision meant that in order to defend himself successfully, Singh would have to prove that the BCA was deliberately and knowingly dishonest in promoting treatments that it knew did not work.

Although the Guardian withdrew the article, Singh chose to appeal Eady's judgment, and attracted considerable support for his goal of keeping libel laws out of scientific debate.

According to Eric Schmidt, "A different kind of company name", The Official Google Blog 4/01/2010:

Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.